The Israeli film “Waltz With Bashir” — Ari Folman’s animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War — was favored to win the Oscar for best foreign language film. But it was beat out for the award Sunday by the Japanese contender “Departures,” about an unemployed classical musician who takes a job in a mortuary.

And so Israel’s Oscar scorecard remains: 8 nominations over 44 years, 0 wins.

In other Oscar news, the reported email campaign against awarding Kate Winslet the best leading actress Oscar for her role in the Holocaust film “The Reader” apparently didn’t work.

In Slate, the critic Ron Rosenbaum recently called “The Reader” a film “that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer” and deemed it the “Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made.”

But Winslet beat out Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, and Melissa Leo in the category for her portrayal of an illiterate Nazi war criminal, responsible for the deaths of 300 women.

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